Recently, many people in Japan have recognized that it is desirable to educate individual students in accordance with different education programs adapted to the respective students. For this purpose, a lot of human resources must be concentrated on the preparation of many different teaching materials. In addition, at least one teacher must be assigned to each group of students of the same education program. In a certain case, one teacher must be assigned to one student. However, such education programs require a high cost and a long preparation time.
On the other hand, a computer-assisted education system is known. An example of such a system is disclosed by David M. Siefert in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. HEI 8-227265 A laid open for public inspection on Sep. 3, 1996, entitled “Computer-Assisted Education System”, which claims convention priority of U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 334,775, 334,778 and 334,780, which were filed on Nov. 4, 1994. In this publication, an exemplary system includes a computer storing a plurality of education programs for presenting subject materials to a student, and communicator means for allowing the student to select and execute the program. Another exemplary system includes administrator means capable of determining whether a student understands a presented educational material, means for generating a profile describing the learning characteristics of the student, and means for storing the profile in the system. The profile is generated based on a test result of the student, a result of a personal interview, and evaluation of the student for an assigned task. Presentation of a lesson to each student can be adjusted according to the profile of the student. The profile contains assessment by an educational psychology test conducted before learning, and a preferred learning style is determined based on the assessment. Furthermore, the learning style is modified based on the student's grasp and learning speed. In this system, it is necessary to prepare some learning styles before the learning.
In this system, however, while the educational material is being presented to the student, learning behavior of the student is not monitored to modify the learning style of subsequent educational materials in response to the monitored learning behavior.
In the Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. HEI 10-333538 A laid open for public inspection on Dec. 18, 1998, T. Wadahama et al. disclosed the “Network Type Education System, Recording Medium Recording Instructor Program of Network Type Education System, and Recording Medium Recording Participant Program”. According to this system in this publication, when questionnaire execution means provides a questionnaire for determining the understanding degree of a lecture for each participant, questionnaire responding means in each terminal device of the participant responds to the questionnaire in accordance with the keyboard operation or the like by the participant. Understanding degree data display means of the terminal device of an instructor aggregates answers of the questionnaires from the participants, and displays the number of participants for each understanding degree on a monitor. Review material presentation means presents a review material corresponding to the understanding degree of each participant.
In this system, however, learning behavior of the participant is not monitored while the teaching material is being presented to the participants.
The inventors have recognized that the learning efficiency can be improved in the computer-assisted education system, by determining a presentation pattern of a teaching material for each learner adaptively in accordance with a personality trait of the learner, and by dynamically or adaptively changing, in response to current learning behavior of the learner, the presentation pattern of teaching materials or video clips for the learner.
An object of the present invention is to determine a presentation pattern of a teaching material that is adapted to a personality trait of a learner in a computer-assisted education system.
Another object of the present invention is to select and edit a teaching material in accordance with the presentation pattern of a teaching material in the computer-assisted education system.
A further object of the present invention is to change the presentation pattern of a teaching material in response to learning behavior of the learner in the computer-assisted education system.